OpenWetWare:Strategy

• Jason R. Kelly 15:41, 15 March 2008 (CDT): Goal here is to do our best to loosely specify the research process and highlights points were information is generated or where collaboration occurs. Our hypothesis is that science would benefit from the information being shared and the collaboration happening widely and in the open.

1. Define each of the stages in the open research pipeline. How important are they to both the existing OWW community and new communities for enabling research or helping it flow more smoothly?
2. Determine the tools, both on OWW and in other places, that support each of the stages in the open research pipeline. Are these the right tools? How do they help the researcher move from one stage to the next, or between stages?
3. Where are the bottlenecks in the open research pipeline?
4. Where are the opportunities to improve the process?

Ideas

• Current widely accepted practice: Ideas are normally not widely shared at this point in the pipeline. Occasionally they will be shared among close colleagues, collaborators, or within labs. Sometimes contained in discussion section of peer-reviewed publications.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: In science: IGEM:Idea exchange. In other fields, haven't looked much: Iowa Electronic Markets and the Hollywood Stock Exchange are examples of online idea futures markets, tools that can harness the collective intelligence of a community. Modeled on the traditional stock markets, participants put up real (or virtual) money to buy stock in an idea, and the process of trading allows the idea to be assigned a value. The higher the value, the more the market users believe in the idea. kluster.com is an example of reward-driven idea exchange. An individual or an organization can run projects on kluster with the option of offering a cash reward for those who help solve their problems. If a participant helps in any way with an idea that finally gets selected that person will get a piece of the reward based upon the amount of work they did.

Background Research

• Current widely accepted practice: This is an information aggregation process. Background research is most commonly disseminated in the form of closed-access, peer-reviewed literature reviews.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Aggregator sites such as postgenomic, scintilla?, OpenWetWare:Reviews. In non-scientific fields there are many examples of tools to aid this process: delicious, technorati

Refined Ideas

• Current widely accepted practice: These are actionable ideas based on experts parsing previous work, and making seeing a gap in knowledge that can be addressed experimentally. These are almost never shared outside of labs.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: None?

Experimental Plan

• Current widely accepted practice: The experimental plan for conducting research. It is normally shared within labs and among collaborators. Individual researchers will often seek advice from trusted scientists in the field as well (e.g. thesis committees).
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Thesis proposals? I posted mine ;)
• There might be incentive to share something like this if there was a market of free-lance scientists that were interested in taking on side projects / plan proposer would need to feel that they were protected from theft of their ides.

Experimental Work

• Current widely accepted practice: Current practice is to keep your notebook on paper on your shelf. It is almost never shared or digitized. Protocols are typically available from copyrighted books, or closed-access journals.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Jean-Claude Bradley & Open Notebook Science crowd, OpenWetWare Lab notebooks, IGEM lab notebooks. protocols online, OWW protocols

Strategic opportunities

• There are many opportunities here, because this is a real pain-point for scientists. Being open can save a lot of time, because the right piece of feedback could save weeks or months of effort by an experimentalist.

Protocols

• Protocols seem like a perfect "lily-pad" as they are generally considered non-competitive and are often traded among scientists independent of the published literature. The success of protocol sharing on OWW is an early demonstration of this. The existing peer-reviewed protocol journals might be looking for a partner to keep "wiki-fied" versions of their content?, they would have the "golden-copy" and community sites like OWW could annotate/edit/etc on a shorter time scale than they can peer-review and copy-edit. So we'd fill the gap between editions of a book like molecular cloning, for instance.

Lab Notebooks

• This is a very hard sell for the typical scientist. However there is a lot of pain associated with a paper lab notebook, it's hard to search, hard to backup, hard to add data into, etc. So a solution for electronifying notebooks might be a good sell. Strategically, scientists spend a lot of their time in their notebook, so if you can get notebooks it might be a great bridge to other things.
• Video notebooks could be another opportunity, but this is really fringe among typical scientists.

Question/Answers

• The significant discussion that takes place on the forums at protocols-online points to a real need for Q/A among scientists that are trying to figure out what protocols to use.

Experimental Debugging

• Current widely accepted practice: Current practice is to do this in your head / in your lab notebook. Not shared.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Nature Preceedings, Journal of negative results in biomedicine

Experimental Results (raw data / pre-analysis)

• Current widely accepted practice: Varies by field. Fields like genomics release data immediately. Most fields don't release data until it's been analyzed.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: what's the agreement that led to opening the genomics data?

Analyzed Results

• Current widely accepted practice: Analyzed results are often published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at conferences, shown on posters.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Open access journals pretty much have this one licked, though peer-review and copy-editing still imposes a significant time delay.

Conclusions

• Current widely accepted practice: Scientific conclusions based on analyzed results. These are often published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at conferences, shown on posters.
• Best examples of sharing/openness: Open access journals share this openly with a delay largely due to peer-review and copy-editing.